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Current research on child poverty in rich countries is mostly quantitative in nature and mainly concentrates on determining its extent and future outcomes. Notwithstanding the valuable results this kind of research has yielded, little is known about what poverty is experienced in the ‘world of children’, i.e., in their daily lives. To consider poverty from a child’s perspective is still rare (e.g. Ridge 2002). The current study of children growing up poor in the affluent Netherlands is an initial attempt and adds to the focus on the children’s perspectives and their coping mechanisms. This way, it enables us to see children’s agency in their own environment. Such an insight can help to develop policy interventions that attend to their needs and make a difference to the daily lives of poor children.

This report on the protection of children from commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking introduces the topic and then examines law and policy on child trafficking in South Asia. A case study from Latin America and the Caribbean is also included in the preliminary findings as it provides an illustration of a coordinated effort to prevent and combat the sexual exploitation of children for the purposes of sex tourism in the Dominican Republic. Other issues addressed are local governance, local action and child protection; the efficacy of cross border interventions in the prevention of trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation; and migration, mobility and challenges to child protection.

Contributions from 27 National Statistical Offices in Central and Eastern Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Baltics form the backbone of the research carried out at the Innocenti Research Centre (IRC) on the region, including for the Innocenti Social Monitor which has been published regularly since 2002, and the annually updated TransMONEE database which contains a wide range of statistical information covering the period 1989 to the present on social and economic issues relevant to the welfare of children, young people and women.The purpose of this report is to present key data, child indicators and selected findings from the information collected in the 2005 edition of the TransMONEE database.

Trafficking of human beings affects every country in Africa for which data are available, either as countries of origin or destination. The report looks at information from 53 African countries and provides an analysis of the patterns, root causes, and existing national and regional policy responses and effective practices.

Socio-economic and political turmoil in Indonesia has had an impact on the country's thirty years of progress in social development. However, it has also opened up new avenues for participation and region-specific policy formulation alongside growing demand for new approaches to the monitoring and analysis of social change. This paper examines the Family-in-Focus Approach - a comprehensive lifespan-based concept of human development.

The Two Faces of Education in Ethnic Conflict challenges a widely-held assumption - that education is inevitably a force for good. While stressing the many stabilizing aspects of good quality education, editors Kenneth Bush and Diana Saltarelli show how education can be manipulated to drive a wedge between people, rather than drawing them closer together.

Falling output and living standards have pushed countries in transition from the socialist system to re-consider how best to target public resources on those in need. The paper investigates the workings of a new social assistance benefit in Uzbekistan, the largest of the former Soviet Central Asian republics, administered by community organizations, the Mahallas.

This working paper documents the economic and social crises in Georgia during the 1990s, their structural causes and the survival strategies adopted by the Georgian population - the vast majority of whom became impoverished, with large families particularly vulnerable.

The 1980s witnessed a number of important shifts in fiscal policy in both the developed and the developing world. This paper examines the Asian experience of this process of change - identifying key reforms and assessing their effectiveness. Particular emphasis is placed throughout upon the equity implications of the various tax systems.

This paper focuses on the equity aspects of tax systems in Latin America. Aftrer reviewing quantative characteristics regarding the level and composition of tax structures, the paper analyses recent country experiences of tax reforms and attempts to show how the design of instruments has coped with distributional issues in taxation.